The Labor Day edition of the New York Times led its National section with a hostile full-page “news analysis” from chief White House correspondent Peter Baker on President Trump’s supposed appeals to white grievance in “Trump Makes White Grievance a Pillar of His Campaign – Seeking a Political Lift From Banning Training On Racial Sensitivity.”
The headline writers stacked the deck, because Trump didn't ban mere "racial sensitivity” training, which sounds relatively benign compared to “Critical Race Theory,” which is what the controversy was actually about. “CRT” is a theoretical construct imported directly from the radical university settings into the corporate world – condemning all whites as racist, and American society is structurally racist, etc. – without regard whether it actually improves racial relations or makes them worse.
Baker has been nasty against Trump before, but this might be his strongest anti-Trump "news" article yet.
After a summer when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets protesting racial injustice against Black Americans, President Trump has made it clear over the last few days that, in his view, the country’s real race problem is bias against white Americans.
Just days after returning from Kenosha, Wis., where he staunchly backed law enforcement and did not mention the name of Jacob Blake, the Black man shot seven times in the back by the police, Mr. Trump issued an order on Friday to purge the federal government of racial sensitivity training that his White House called “divisive, anti-American propaganda.”
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In effect, he is reaching out to a subset of white voters who think the news media and political elites see Trump supporters as inherently racist. Mr. Trump has repeatedly rejected the notion that America has a problem with systemic racial bias, dismissing instances of police brutality against Black Americans as the work of a few “bad apples,” in his words.
“Trump is the most extreme, and he has done something that is beyond the bounds of anything we have seen,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “Playing with racism is a dangerous game. It’s not that you can do it a little bit or do it slyly or do it with a dog whistle. It’s all dangerous, and it’s all potentially violent.”
It took Baker forever to semi-elucidate what the misleading phrase “racial sensitivity” training actually entailed, citing second-hand from “conservative scholar” Christopher Rufo, who broke the scandal on the bizarre federal government training sessions.
On his website, Mr. Rufo identified six agencies that had conducted training sessions that he said asserted that America is inherently racist and promoted concepts like unconscious bias, white privilege and white fragility. At the Treasury Department, for instance, he said employees had been told that “virtually all white people contribute to racism” and that white staff members should “struggle to own their racism.”
Even later in the piece, Baker acknowledged Trump is attacking the politically correct but historically inaccurate "1619 Project" that the Times is pushing on schools:
Mr. Trump wrote or reposted roughly 20 Twitter messages about the memo on Saturday and on Sunday said the Education Department would investigate schools that use curriculum from the 1619 Project by The New York Times Magazine, an effort to look at American history through the frame of slavery’s consequences and the contributions of Black Americans.
Baker couldn't stop with the racial accusations.
Critics said the president’s move was a transparent play for white votes with less than two months until the Nov. 3 election.
That particular “critic” is author Ibram X. Kendi, author of a quack tome popular in progressive circles, How to Be an Anti-Racist. According to Kendi’s book (which even condemns Barack Obama) there has never been a disparate outcome that is not the result of racism.
